The production of automatic translations has been and continues to be the subject of a number of research and development projects, since considerable economic and technological importance is given to the possibility of automatically producing a translation from certain languages into others with minimum human intervention, based almost exclusively on handling the relevant translation equipment and on effecting minor corrections in order to reflect certain nuances, contained in the original text, in the translated text which the translation machine has not been capable of rendering. As an example of the economic importance of translation, mention should be made of the large quantity of texts (leaflets, articles, instruction manuals, etc.) which are produced throughout the world and the majority of which have to be translated into different languages. Another example is the considerable amount of its budget that the European Community allocates to translation production. The automation of translation in these and other cases which may be mentioned would undoubtedly have great economic significance, given the ensuing reduction in costs.
Some automatic translation systems which have already been developed are based on the transfer of a text in a source language to an intermediate language and from the latter to the translated text in a target language, the intermediate language representing a synthesis of morphological, syntactical and semantic characteristics common to the source language and to the intermediate language. In these systems of the prior art, the said intermediate language is usually set up always for the two concrete languages which are involved in the translation process, that is to say the same intermediate language cannot be used to translate into two or more destination languages, but each pair of source and target languages will be allocated its own intermediate language.
Consequently, an automatic translation system which, using a single intermediate language, makes it possible to translate simultaneously from one source language into two or more target languages is not known in the prior art. It is here that the invention, which has developed a system of synthesising a linguistic theory based on linguistic principles permitting computational optimisation and which has given rise to the development of highly efficient technologies for processing natural language, is of interest.